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There is growing international concern on the biased representation of persons in the preparation of the WHO Monograph on Radiofrequency Radiation. As discussed earlier the group is dominated by members of ICNIRP. In fact the Ethical Board at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden concluded already in 2008 that being a member of ICNIRP may be a conflict of interest that should be stated in scientific publications (Karolinska Institute Diary Number 3753-2008-609).

A recent letter to WHO written by members of the BioInitiative Working Group describes the unbalanced ‘no-risk’ group at WHO preparing the document. The full text may be read here.

As a scientist who has done an in-depth study of the scientific literature on biological effects of radiofrequency/microwave EMR (emitted by all wireless devices such as mobile phones), I am very concerned about the position of the WHO on this issue. I can clearly see that public health risk is being down-played due to the close association of the WHO with pro-industry groups such as ICNIRP. WHO’s International EMF Project has conflicts of interest and has clearly failed in its mission.

As for the IARC monographs on RFR, here’s one example of a serious error – how a positive study on cancer became a negative study:
A study conducted to very high standards at the University of Washington with over $4 million funding from the US Air Force [Chou C-K et al 1992] found a near 4-fold increase in cancers in rats exposed to low-level (non thermal) RFR exposure at 2.45 GHz (WiFi and radar frequency) along with changed metabolic, immune and hormonal functions. However, the researchers with apparent conflicts of interest) claimed lack of clinical significance in the absence of statistically significant increase of cancer in any one tissue type (i.e. cancers developed in different organs). Intriguingly, the IARC expert panel report also replicated this erroneous conclusion stating: “An increased incidence of total malignant tumours (all sites) was observed in rats exposed to RF radiation compared with sham-exposed controls (Chou et al., 1992). [The Working Group considered this finding to be of limited biological significance, since it resulted from pooling of non-significant changes in tumour incidence in several sites.]” (page 259, IARC monographs 2013).

It is clearly unscientific to expect tissue specificity with an environmental agent that readily penetrate different types of biological tissue and demonstrated to induce similar deleterious effects on a range of cell types. RFR can induce a range of cytotoxic effects including DNA damage (apparently via oxidative stress) and also profoundly alter normal biological functions leading to cancer.